Deng Shicai can see through the battle reports of Zhang Kaishan on the front line that the current battlefield is a furnace that torments people's hearts. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

Both sides are unable to launch large-scale offensive operations, and after suffering many losses, no matter what method the Ming army uses, it is now impossible to transfer the US troops out of their positions, and Zhang Kaishan even said that even if the Ming army is now defeated on a large scale, the US troops will not pursue it for fear of being ambushed.

However, in the stalemate between the two sides, it is impossible that there will be no casualties, but on the contrary, the casualties will be very large. As in all wars of this era, the main cause of casualties is not combat casualties, but from the invasion of diseases, malaria and measles are the most deadly diseases, which seriously deplete the physical strength of soldiers and erode their health and even their lives.

According to the current statistics of the Ming army, of the total 120,000 people killed in battle, less than 50,000 died in direct combat, and it can be said that two-thirds of the deaths were due to disease.

Although the U.S. military is fighting on its own, the situation of the U.S. military is not much better than that of the Ming Army, mainly soldiers from the northern United States, who will also get sick when they come to the southern part of the United States, and the official statistics of the United States during the Civil War show that from the summer of 1863 to the summer of 1864, the annual infection rate of intermittent fever in the northern army was 233%, and each soldier had an average of two or more attacks.

During the war, the annual incidence of malaria never fell below 40 per cent. Up to 361968 soldiers were infected by the malaria parasite in the highest year. According to post-war statistics, at least 600,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, most of the dead were not killed in battle, and disease killed twice as many Northern soldiers as Southern bullets and shells.

Compared with the deaths, what worries Zhang Kaishan the most is the weakness caused by the disease, although the 120,000 deaths are terrible, but relative to the total strength of the Ming army, it does not affect the overall combat effectiveness of the troops. However, the germs made the soldiers very weak, and they were easily struck down by dysentery and measles, resulting in severe non-combat attrition, and there were always an average of 300,000 soldiers in the rear hospitals.

Although the U.S. military has cities to rely on, most of the soldiers have to confront the Ming army in the cold and damp trenches, and the disease is also their most headache, and the composition of the U.S. military is complex, the Irish, Italians, Germans, the British, the French, the Russians and even the blacks, many of whom are first-generation immigrants and can't even speak English proficiently. From time to time, gunshots can be heard, mostly at night, sometimes I hear that American soldiers have committed suicide, and sometimes soldiers have rebelled.

At this point, the resilient Ming army is relatively much better, especially when fighting abroad, the possibility of escape is even lower, because no one will think about escaping in a strange land, instinctively relying on each other and relying on the collective strength to survive.

So one by one the young soldiers went into the dirty trenches, confronted the enemy, then fell ill, wounded, died, and then returned to the rear, and new young soldiers took his place into the trenches, and so on.

The siege began in September and lasted for three months, and by December, the two sides were still facing off. There are no civilians left in Houston, except for the military, a handful of industrial workers who serve the military. However, Houston's population has not decreased, even more than it did before the war, because it has gathered two million soldiers and the service personnel who serve those two million soldiers, and there are almost three million people in the entire city of Houston.

Such a high rate of urban population concentration, obviously beyond the load of the city, traffic no longer matters, at this time basically no commuting, the key is that the water supply and drainage beyond the annex, the previous Houston is just a small city of 40,000 people, mainly based on commerce and trade, such a small city suddenly poured in three million people, is a huge pressure on its carrying capacity.

Because it is impossible to solve the problem of eating, drinking, and lazing for three million people in the short term, the streets are filled with sewage and feces, just as in New York 30 years ago, people even had to move through the excrement of people and horses up to their ankles, and malaria and other epidemics that were prevalent in the army spread rapidly in the cities.

Relatively speaking, the Americans were still in a better position than the Ming army, after all, there was a city that was sheltered from the wind and rain, and they had the advantage of troops, but they still refused to attack, preferring to suffer in the city rather than launch a counterattack against the Ming army, which was far less powerful than them and scattered around Houston.

At the same time, the navy led by Chen Ada is also in another kind of torment. If the Army tells them that being in the trenches is an ordeal, the Navy will tell them that they don't know how to be blessed, and for the Navy, the Army has a flat land, but the Navy doesn't even have a place to stay.

Malaria and measles are also contracted by the Navy, because their sanitary conditions are not ideal, and the Army can at least drink clean hot water, which is a luxury for the Navy.

Therefore, the long sea route of more than 30,000 kilometers is also a purgatory journey for the navy. After Chen Ada set off from Guangzhou, he arrived in Hawaii one month, and then assembled the fleet here, and after the fleet was assembled one after another, he set off in the second month, and in another month, the Ming fleet bypassed Cape Horn and entered the waters of the Southern Plains.

At this time, the Americans discovered that the Ming naval fleet had all been dispatched and entered the Atlantic Ocean, and there were those who rejoiced and those who panicked, because there were always people who wanted to fight a decisive battle with the Ming army, and there were always people who were afraid of war, because in the face of war, there were always people who only saw honor, and there were always people who saw danger.

After receiving the news that the main fleet of the Ming Dynasty had entered the Atlantic, the US Navy knew that a major war was inevitable, so it began to actively prepare. The navy began high-density training, and its strong industrial strength allowed them to carry out extravagant live-fire training, and artillery shells were thrown out like money. At the same time, frequent formation training can also be carried out, and every day the level of the US Navy is improving and its strength is increasing.

Compared with the U.S. military, which can prepare for the upcoming big war without distractions, the Daming Navy even has to focus more on the long journey of confrontation, for them, only after passing a distance of more than 30,000 kilometers can they obtain the qualification to engage with the U.S. military in a short hand.

The officers and men of the Navy have never experienced the strength of Britain for a moment as they do now, and the ability of the British to conduct global military operations half a century ago is still a huge difficulty for the Ming Navy.

No foreign port would welcome the Ming fleet, they would only see it as a great threat, and they could not afford to provoke it, nor did they like it. Therefore, the Ming fleet did not have a harbor to anchor, but they had to rest.

By the time they entered the Atlantic, the entire naval fleet had a third of the men and more than 10,000 sick and wounded, and if they could not rest again, the navy would not be able to cope with the ensuing war anyway.

The La Plata River is the boundary river between Argentina and Uruguay, and neither country would welcome the Ming navy soldiers to land, but the large fleet still forced its way into this open estuary and forcibly anchored in the estuary, and the two countries strongly protested to the Ming, but the Ming diplomats told them that the Ming navy intended to visit Paraguay.

Compared with these two countries, Paraguay and the Ming Navy are not welcome, but they do not dare to refuse.

In this part of South America, the Ming does not have the largest number of immigrants in Paraguay, but the proportion is the highest. In the war that broke out between 1864 and 1870 for control of the Río de la Plata with three of its neighbors, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay's population was reduced from 520,000 to 220,000, with fewer than 30,000 adult men. The Ming immigrants in Paraguay were only 50,000, but they maintained the largest Chinese community in the country, and Paraguay, which was severely short of labor, relied largely on the Chinese to sustain its economy.

Correspondingly, the Chinese also controlled the country's economy, which was the backbone of the country's economy, providing two-thirds of the country's revenue, from commerce and services to handicrafts.

The relatively strong economic power of the Chinese here allows them to take care of their soldiers relatively highly.

Chen Ada ordered the fleet to anchor at the mouth of the La Plata River, and then let the officers and men of each ship enter Paraguay in batches called passenger ships to rest and recuperate, and one-third of them rotated, each shift lasted ten days, and spent a month and a half here, so that every soldier was relaxed on land.

They had a long-lost hot meal, took a hot bath, and even had a good time with a local woman. Both physically and mentally relaxed, knowing that at the end of November, they set off again.

But in the next 4,000 nautical miles and more than 8,000 kilometers of voyage, they will never find such an opportunity again, because whether in Brazil or other South American countries, although there are also Chinese immigrants, the local Chinese immigrants do not have the ability to mobilize local resources like in Paraguay, and it is impossible to give them appropriate help.

A month later, they rounded the South American coast as a whole, approached the Caribbean Sea, and got closer and closer to the war zone, and had already spotted American reconnaissance ships many times.

He finally found a natural bay suitable for anchoring near the Lesser Antilles, and concealed his fleet in it, and between the Dutch and Spanish-controlled islands, they found a leeward place, which was run by a group of white slave owners, and because of the leeward, it was relatively dry, and although it did not have the support of the Chinese, it at least allowed the soldiers to rest.

After a month of resting in rotation here, the local plantation owners were nervous, and in the face of strong protests from the Spanish government, the Ming army forcibly landed on several islands and set up camp to rest.

The reason why it was chosen here is because in the Caribbean divided by the Netherlands, Britain, France and Spain, there is an archipelago controlled by Denmark, which is part of the Lesser Antilles, which the Danes call the Western Cape Indies, consisting of three main islands: Santa Cruz, St. John and St. Thomas. At present, the Chinese also have a certain economic influence in the local area.

The most important thing is that Denmark has always had a good relationship with Daming over the years, and Daming has maintained relations with small countries like Denmark and Sweden for a long time, and the cost is not high, although the benefits are not much, but it finally came in handy. Denmark did not dare to let the Ming fleet dock, they could not afford to offend the United States, but they did not refuse the support of the local Chinese for the navy.

So the navy is docked near here, at least some fresh vegetables and other daily necessities can be obtained through the local Chinese.

A month later, they recovered a little and set off again, and by the end of January, they were heading straight into the Caribbean, into the Gulf of Mexico, and their journey was coming to an end, and war was coming.

Even if they don't leave, the war will not be far away, because while they are resting, the US reconnaissance fleet has appeared more and more frequently in the vicinity, obviously although this is not the territory of the United States, but because of the geographical convenience, this is almost half of the home of the United States.